How ASICS turned movement into a creative platform

ASICS Global Head of Marketing, Gary Raucher is a keynote speaker at Famous Campaigns Live.

ASICS has been disciplined and creative in the way it has consistently built its brand platform.

Rather than treating mental wellbeing as a loose theme, ASICS has repeatedly turned the same core belief into tangible campaign ideas: movement can change how people feel.

What makes the body of work interesting is that each execution lands that thought in a different way, from workplace culture to school sport, influencer habits and even dogs.

The result is a body of campaigns that feels coherent without becoming repetitive, and practical without losing personality.

Desk Break

For Desk Break, ASICS made the office desk the villain. Ahead of World Mental Health Day 2024, it enlisted Brian Cox to front a public service-style film warning workers about the mental strain of uninterrupted desk time.

Little Reminders

ASICS introduced the world’s youngest exercise influencer team, the ASICS ‘Little Reminders’, whose mission is to remind adults to exercise for how it makes them feel and not how it makes them look.

Dramatic Transformations

On World Mental Health Day, ASICS shone a light on why the most important transformation to consider isn’t physical.

With Dramatic Transformations, ASICS hijacked the familiar before-and-after format and redirected it toward mental wellbeing. It also pledged to stop sharing purely aesthetic transformation imagery on its own channels, giving the campaign a sharper point of view.

Mind’s Best Friend

ASICS became the first sports brand to sign a dog to its ambassador roster, recognising dogs as the original exercise influencers who motivate millions to move for body and mind.

The Undropped Kit

The Undropped Kit tackled a more specific participation barrier: why teenage girls drop out of sport. Working with Inclusive Sportswear and mental health charity Mind, ASICS developed a reimagined PE kit based on research and input from girls themselves.

Movement for Mind

Movement for Mind was less a one-off ad campaign than a structured programme that showed ASICS trying to turn its brand belief into a repeatable practice.

The promotion saw ASICS running shoes sealed within giant medicinal blister packs and contained in a box designed to look like painkillers

Built as a free eight-week audio series with 16 sessions, it combined walking or running with breathing, mindfulness and reflection.

Taken together, these campaigns show ASICS doing something many brands talk about but few sustain: building a platform through accumulation.

It keeps finding new proof points, new settings and new audiences for that belief, which is why the platform has held its shape so effectively.